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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26997079">Summoning</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo'>sigo</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars Sequel Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(Hux helps), Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Armitage Hux Lives, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, Blow Jobs, Bottom Armitage Hux, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Child Death, Follows the canon trilogy in vignettes, Hux is a psychopath here, Huxloween, Huxloween 2020, Idiots in Love, Kylo Ren Lives (sort of), Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Mentioned Brendol Hux, Porn With Plot, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rimming, Summoning, Summoning Circles, That's Not How The Force Works, Top Kylo Ren, also brief previous marriage mention, brief child death mention, but he has a soft spot for idiots in helmets and cloaks, but there IS summoning I swear to you, the actual summoning doesn't take a long time, the smut is at the end, this is longer than I planned</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:53:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,986</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26997079</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“How would you do it? How would you summon those ghosts you told me to fear?”<br/>“No, no, no--”<br/>“Kylo. You must tell me.” It didn’t taste like begging this time, even to Hux’s pride. It tasted like guiding, like ushering a hesitant student toward the necessary action. Kylo’s repeated dream hung heavy between them as Hux recovered his breath and Kylo recovered his identity, almost torn asunder by the scavenger, acting as messenger from a past self. As if divulging a great embarrassment, Kylo told Hux what to do.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Huxloween 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Summoning</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>TW -- Hux is just not nice here, in addition to the ways he's not nice in canon. Also, in this fic Hux was married to a woman at one point and had a child with her who died, if that sinks your boat. It's not a central theme.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Hux’s first posting after graduating from Arkanis Academy was aboard the <em> Absolution </em> under his father’s watchful eye, where he quickly scaled the ranks and reported directly to Brendol. He’d been described by an academy psychiatrist as ‘naturally manipulative’ and he knew it was true, but he resented the woman who’d added it to his chart. He suspected it was the reason Brendol had kept him so close despite their distaste for each other. Hux was adept at affecting sincerity and a sort of quiet exigency that the younger officers reporting to him went starry-eyed over, thrilled to be drawn into the orbit of a Lieutenant General. To feel personally needed. Superior officers were by nature immune to artifice, and Hux was intelligent enough to turn off the charm for them, thereby surpassing his peers. He was the youngest Lieutenant General in the First Order, and soon the youngest General. Brendol bringing Phasma aboard was fortuitous for Hux.</p><p>At Brendol’s funeral a holophoto of Hux’s graduating class at the academy -- Brendol’s last year as the Commandant -- was displayed on the wall, Hux isolated in the background, tall and pale-eyed, his expression a smile that was more like a snarl. Hux had always been thin, but he cut a good figure in uniform. His greatcoat was an improvement over the cadet jacket in the glowing photo. Hux listened to people recount the good deeds of the man who’d beaten him bloody until he was big enough to conceivably fight back, and then he went back to his room and dreamed about the men he’d loved in his reckless youth. Before he’d matured and steadied. They had been men, but he’d hardly been one. The affairs had happened shortly before graduation. He dreamed of how their faces went empty after he slid a knife between their ribs, their supplications silenced. Pleasure turned to terror and then to placid nothingness, sweetest of all. When Brendol discovered that Hux was carrying on a romantic intrigue with the academy librarian, and had the fellow whipped on the lawn before his dismissal and exile, as a lesson to Hux about weakness. Hux learned. The men he loved didn’t live after that. He gave them mercy they wouldn’t receive should they survive to be used against him.</p><p>The dream shifted. He’d married once, just after his posting on the <em> Absolution </em> and completely at the behest of Brendol. It was a mistake in every way, that union. Hux had still striven to impress Brendol then, and his academic and career achievements paled in comparison to one other prize he could offer his father: a legitimate grandson with a respectable mother’s name listed in his record. Brendol coveted someone trueborn to carry on the family legacy, cursed thing that it was. Brendol selected the bride. Hux would have been happier with an old battle-axe. Someone sharp and cunning, but of course procreation was the point, not happiness. Instead he got someone soft and sweet, from an Empire family but never involved in the war effort beyond gilded fundraising events on the arm of a uniformed father. He’d applied for and received permission to share his quarters with her for reasons of family expansion, a lifestyle neither of them enjoyed. He wanted solace, and she plainly didn’t care for sparse life on a Star Destroyer. Hux treated her gently, more out of a desire to be as unlike Brendol as possible than any genuine fondness for her. He could tell she was underwhelmed by his starched and dutiful affections outside the bedroom (she made no complaints beneath his sheets, digging her manicured nails into his back and moaning drivel against his ear that he couldn’t bear to return), and he tried to stifle the darker thoughts her palpable discontent raised in him.</p><p><em> Be grateful I’ve not loved you like I loved them </em> , was one such thought, meaning the trail of bodies he left in his wake before her. <em> Your father never beat you, did he? What would you do with yourself if your husband did? </em> Was another.</p><p>She caught pregnant quickly and delivered Hux a son, a bright point of happiness in Brendol’s life, which was approaching its untimely end. If Hux had known what would become of the baby, he might have murdered his father sooner and spared him the heartache. Brendol’s sobbing grief over his grandson didn’t make up for Hux’s obvious relief. His wife looked down at the cold body of their child, made at the cost of valuable sleep in a Lieutenant General’s off hours and then unmade by a congenital heart defect traced to her side of its genealogy, and then she looked up at Hux’s calm face. He hadn’t been quick enough to disguise it, and she saw: he’d dreaded raising a child in any capacity, and now the weight was lifted. He could devote himself entirely to his work without the sharp serpent’s tooth of responsibility for another human life buried in him. The news that he was no one’s father was perhaps the <em> best </em> he’d ever received. She’d screeched at him to get out of their quarters and then took her own advice, shipping herself back home and serving him a divorce comm from there. He granted it to her without fuss.</p><p>Hux woke from those dreams and groped at his side table for a cigarra, lighting up in the dark of his new quarters. There were more stripes on the sleeves of the coat hanging on its hook by the door. His unfortunate childhood and the red blur of his early twenties faded as nicotine flooded his brain. His hands stopped trembling.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>The <em> Finalizer </em> was a bride that Hux allowed himself to love. It came with a shadowy new financier and a co-commander. Hux met them both on a station in the Outer Rim and exchanged...what could not be called pleasantries. There were other people there, old Empire families lured back by Snoke that the First Order had not been able to entice. Hux knew the dance. He drank with them and socialized, his face moving in the right ways at the right times. His attention was on Ren, who remained stoic and masked throughout the gathering, a Darth Vader mimic if he’d ever seen one.</p><p>An older couple propositioned Hux boldly, not the first time he’d had to diplomatically turn down such a request, and his co-commander hissed out a breath through his helmet and left the gathering. It appeared that the new sorcerers in the universe were just as puritanical as their lost Jedi brothers. Hux reflected that, that being the case, it would have been amusing to see Ren’s reaction if he accepted the offer. But Hux wasn’t stupid -- he knew a honey trap when he saw one. A hologram of his exploits in this couple’s bedroom would no doubt make it around the galaxy. It might not hinder his goals -- he wasn’t one to be swayed by shame -- but it was better to take only well-calculated risks.</p><p>Especially now, because Hux was pregnant, in all the important senses of the word. His progeny would not be made of flesh and blood but durasteel and kyber. The schematics were seared into his brain, and already construction had begun. He’d envisioned the red light his weapon would emit so frequently that it seeped into his dreams. The dismal humming of his past, the taste of blood licked from knuckles and the feel of rain so cold his face went numb and the smell of moldering academy hallways, none of it survived the cleansing dream-sight of a holy planet hollowed out and grinning. Hux worked with a fevered intensity to make it real.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>Hux descended onto Starkiller with Kylo Ren at his heels and they walked together into the brisk air. Hux breathed deeply, lungs jolted by the chill and excitement lolling in his stomach, the feeble line between victory and lust glitching out like a cracked holoscreen. It was in the holochamber beneath the base, where Snoke insisted on projecting himself seven times his actual size, that Hux first saw his co-commander’s face.</p><p>He entered and Ren stared back at him, mouth agape for a moment before he remembered himself and his features transformed into a deep scowl. The Knight hadn’t expected to be interrupted. Good to know that Snoke kept the both of them on a choke chain of linked secrets. Good, also, to fill the questioning void of what lay under Ren’s helmet. The man did not need his infernal contraption to breathe. Purely an aesthetic choice then, to wear it while strolling the halls. Hux looked unabashedly at Ren while Snoke addressed them both, taking in the jut of his nose and the way he furrowed his brows, his plush lips and dark, glistening eyes. He looked like a little princeling. He <em> was </em> one -- Hux knew that. Snoke had trusted him with the information, if only to prevent any outburst or rash decision should Ren’s scandalous lineage be eventually uncovered by the General of the First Order.</p><p>It was interesting to note, too, that Ren was offensively attractive. Physically imposing and imbued with the powers of a young god, and a good warrior (Hux could admit it to himself; wild rathtars would not have drawn the confession from his lips in front of Ren). Hux added the final piece: a pretty face framed by dark curls. If he ever did see one of the deep space angels some pilots rambled on about with dreamy looks in their eyes, Hux thought the poor beast would have difficulty holding a candle to Ren. All his past conquests had been shadows of what stood before him now, almost as if Hux had been chasing this man before he’d known he existed in all the galaxy.</p><p>Ren quivered beside him, face subtly pinker in the lowlight of the chamber, biting his lower lip until it went partially white. Any more and a dark trickle of blood would slide down his chin.<em> Listening in? </em> Hux thought pointedly, smirking. Ren released his lip, dark eyes flicking over briefly, burning with black hatred.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>Hux instructed the officers’ lounge on base to serve its wares <em> gratis </em> two nights before Starkiller’s first test. He himself did not saunter in until the wee hours of the morning, finding the party winding down just as he’d hoped. The officers still here would pass on the word that their leader had taken part, and that would increase morale, and Hux didn’t have to entertain the rowdiest among them. The bottles lining the bar looked low, especially the Corellian brandy. He ordered a whiskey from the droid behind the bar and lit a cigarra, making idle chat until the room emptied except for Mitaka snoozing with his head down on a table.</p><p>Hux slid his glass back toward the droid, about to turn in, and a huge gloved hand came down on top of his.</p><p>“Another,” Ren instructed the droid. It obediently poured a second measure of whiskey for Hux. Hux took it.</p><p>“You won’t drink?” He asked after his first sip. Ren still had his helmet on. It was possible that he would refuse a drink simply to keep the bucket on his head, even if there were no vows of sobriety for his ilk.</p><p>Ren surprised Hux by unclasping his helmet and pulling it off with a pneumatic hiss. He set it on the bar. He looked spooked, eyes flitting around the room with its mirrored walls and red velvet furnishings, seeing ten other Hux-and-Rens reflected around them. Ren settled himself onto the barstool beside Hux’s and put his hands on the bar, clenched into fists.</p><p>“I haven’t had whiskey before,” he said, sounding a little lost.</p><p>Hux opened his mouth to start an inane line of questioning about Ren’s flavor preferences and then snapped his teeth shut. Ren was unlikely to give answers. He’d make this just as difficult as he made everything. Hux had about twenty destroyed-and-repaired consoles and over one thousand ignored comms that would attest to that.</p><p>“You can have a taste of mine,” Hux said, thinking that he’d rather Ren take that taste from his lips than his glass.</p><p>“Don’t. Don’t think those things around me,” Ren said sharply, just as uptight as the day they’d first met. Hux wordlessly slid his own glass over and watched Ren take a larger sip from it than he should and then cough.</p><p>Hux laughed, and Ren went red from rage and embarrassment as much as the burn of the alcohol. Before Ren could throw a tantrum here -- Hux’s officers would be dismayed indeed if the base’s liquor supply were destroyed -- Hux said, “It was much the same for me the first time. I nearly choked.” He asked the droid to pour Ren a jet juice instead. It was blue and syrupy. “You’ll find that better, I think.”</p><p>Ren drank it tentatively, and issued no complaint. Mitaka stirred and stumbled out the door without a backward glance. The bolt on the door slid shut behind him even though no one had touched the control panel, and Ren’s shoulders relaxed.</p><p>“Did you want something?” Hux asked, moving on to a new cigarra, stubbing the last one out in the ashtray in front of him, ash crumbling under his fingertips.</p><p>“There are cracks in the galaxy,” Ren said, his voice low and stony, as though he spent great effort flattening it when he wasn’t wearing his vocoder. “And in those fissures, something that thinks.”</p><p>“We’ve known each other for nearly five years,” Hux said, exhaling smoky breath, “and I am still uncertain where magic ends and utter shit begins with you.”</p><p>“You had a night terror last night. I felt it through the wall.”</p><p>“Are you going to tell me it was an imp squatting on my chest? Every culture has such a tale. On Arkanis they say it’s a cat with a crone’s face curled up on the body of the dreamer, weighing them down. Thoroughly debunked. Like hallucinations, and delusions, and the way the skin crawls in old stone buildings where the floor and walls aren’t perfectly level. Nothing unholy there.”</p><p>“You’re a fool,” Ren said, his voice uncharacteristically light. He was smiling faintly. “And on top of that, you’re no fun.”</p><p>“I’ve come about my skepticism organically. I’ve toured the galaxy.”</p><p>“Heard the Loth-wolf howl?”</p><p>Hux nodded. “And the tooka chirp and the shaak bleat, and men moaning as they died. I’ve seen no monsters. Save <em> you </em>.”</p><p>“And I am unconvincing?” Ren was leaning closer. His lips were shiny from drink. Hux didn’t favor sweet things, but he wanted to take Ren’s lower lip between his teeth and suck.</p><p>“Thoroughly.”</p><p>“I don’t inspire a chill down your spine, General?” Ren teased.</p><p>“Not one I wish to avoid,” Hux said quietly. He didn’t need to speak up. They were tipped toward each other, shoulders brushing, Ren’s breath ghosting across Hux’s face when he spoke.</p><p>“Don’t answer your door at night after the first knock,” Ren said sagely.</p><p>“There is no night,” Hux admonished him. “Not for spacefaring men, and soon not here, once Ilum’s sun is harvested. What sort of monster would I ward off by waiting for a second tap at my door?”</p><p>Ren launched into old legends of the dead walking, summoned back from the Force itself to the waking galaxy by unfinished business. There were benevolent spirits, and evil ones too. If a glowing blue figure just materialized next to you, there was no need to panic, Ren explained. The Light ghosts were ill-mannered and pushy. It was Darkness that knocked. Hux was laughing by the end of Ren’s wild tale, smiling wide and unable to stop. Part of that was the second glass of whiskey. He could see their reflection over Ren’s shoulder, the corner of Ren’s smiling cheek and his own white teeth flashing in response.</p><p>“I thought you were chasing the Dark. Now you want me to turn it away?” Hux asked. Ren’s arm was solid against his from shoulder to elbow. Their hands rested with a millimeter of space between them.</p><p>“Either side isn’t something to throw oneself into. The Force will use you, if you’re not careful. I don’t want that,” Ren said solemnly, and Hux wasn’t sure whether he was offering advice or confessing something for himself.</p><p>“You use it instead,” Hux murmured, feeling a grudging bloom of understanding grow in the seat of his soul. He could empathize with that, with being born into something intent on grinding him up into paste to oil the gears and having to claw his way out and turn the machine on its head for survival.</p><p>“Exactly,” Ren said with more intensity than necessary, eyes fevered and bleary. The speakers in the bar transitioned from bopping jizz music at the edges of hearing into something slower with plucked-string instruments.</p><p>Hux’s fingers were warm, his cigarra burning down low. He stubbed it out and retrieved another from his case, leaving it out on the bar this time. “Would you like one?”</p><p>“I haven’t smoked either,” Ren said, that old bashfulness rising immediately to the surface again, like a child whose hand has been slapped away from shiny things ten too many times.</p><p>Hux wordlessly took another out and held it up for Ren to take between his lips, and said, “Breathe in. Here.” He leaned in so that the lit end of his cigarra touched Ren’s unlit one. Ren started to lean away, eyes wide, and Hux grabbed his jaw roughly in one gloved hand to hold him in place. Ren obeyed, breathing deep. Orange flared and flickered between them and then Hux pulled away. Ren exhaled smoke, holding his lit cigarra in hand and looking at it with open wonder. They puffed in silence for a while.</p><p>“What do you think?” Hux prompted, feeling ludicrously like a host needing a sign of approval from a stoic guest. Ren wasn’t making the same disgusted face he’d made with the whiskey, at least.</p><p>“It’s bitter,” Ren said. “But warm. I like that about it.”</p><p>“So what is it that lives in these cracks in the galaxy?” Hux asked. “More ghosts?” He immediately wished he hadn’t brought it up. Ren’s expression turned opaque and mask-like, his overly expressive eyes even clouding. He put his cigarra down in Hux’s ashtray without stubbing it out.</p><p>“I’ve got to meditate,” he said, standing up to leave.</p><p>“I have a bottle of champagne in my quarters,” Hux said, grasping at anything to keep Ren around. It made his insides feel like ice, the realization of what he was doing. He hadn’t pursued anyone with any fervor since the ill-fated librarian. His lovers had fallen into his lap over the years and wished they hadn’t the moment the act was done. Ren wasn’t something he could consume and dispose of. He was valuable to the war effort, for one.</p><p>“You probably also have a dozen STDs,” Ren said, that teasing edge back in his face, though it was still dampened by something cold. “Exotic ones, incurable by fire.”</p><p>“I don’t like to brag,” Hux said.</p><p>Ren left, leaving the door unlocked this time, and Hux sat a while longer at the bar. He picked up Ren’s still-smoking cigarra and exchanged it with his own, letting his tongue rest briefly on the paper where Ren’s lips had been as he inhaled.</p><p>That night, Hux bolted up in bed, dreaming that he’d heard a single timid knock at his door. His head was already funny from too many cigarra and an extra drink, his mouth stale despite the thorough brushing he’d given his teeth and tongue. He went to his window, looking out on the planet he had transformed, a pale egg floating in space waiting for the seed of ambition to fertilize it. In two days time the first knife-sharp labor pain would hit. The trees outside the base walls shivered in the icy breeze. Hux shuddered as if he could feel it on his skin, as if the insulation of durasteel and transparisteel were not enough. Pockets of light from the base swept up into the deeper gloom and made Hux think of past battles, of star destroyers crashing to the surface of an oceanic planet and being swallowed there, lights blinking off as water flooded the crafts, drowning them.</p><p>The starry night was vast and chill on Ilum. Yesterday if Hux had looked upon this view it would have meant little to him, except that it was not preferable to the view from the<em> Finalizer </em>’s bridge. Tonight, Hux looked out at the twinkling stars and imagined some malevolent entity gazing hungrily down at him, sucking his warmth out.</p><p><em> Pfassking Ren and his fairy tales </em>.</p><p>Fear awakened in Hux, stirred up by Ren’s religious fanaticism but kept aflame by something else. Perhaps just his own imminent mortality. Hux was a practical man and a warmonger, but he was not without anxiety over death. It had always loomed like an inevitable deadline, spurring him on to accomplish his goals in the unknowable time allotted to him. Tonight death seemed changed, not a deadline but a monster staring at him from a pit. Something capable of thought, not a phantom of his own primitive terror surfacing from his primordial human self but something <em> outside </em>. Other.</p><p>Whatever the source, Hux was afraid to stand in the silver rectangle of light on his bedroom floor, shining in from the outer darkness. The <em> night </em>. That night followed him back into sleep, gnawing at him under the electric hum of the base.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>It was all gone to the grave. His life’s work. His child, the only one that had ever mattered. Things had soured before he even knew it, rebels in the oscillator room laying bombs. Ren had gone after them without bothering to send Hux an alert, and now Starkiller was finished. Hux retrieved Ren, pulling him bleeding and broken onto a shuttle and then having him dunked into a bacta tank to knit together again or die.</p><p>Hux sealed himself in his quarters that night after the orders were given and the repairs reports signed, and sobbed. It was the first time in his adult life he cried. He pictured the way the sky had looked as Ilum’s sun was harvested, roiling gray clouds turning red and then purple and then indistinguishable black as the light of the star behind them diminished, an unearthly haze. And then the beam, the one Hux had dreamed of. A weapon unmatched in history, the vile Republic destroyed in one blow. Order was close, victory at hand. And then….</p><p>And then.</p><p>Hux lost time. He only knew because he sent a comm to Mitaka when he surfaced, inquiring whether there had really been nothing to brief him on the last two days, and Mitaka informed him it had been five. Hux groaned as he rolled out of bed. He knocked once on the bed frame and then laughed to himself. He had a bottle of champagne here, too. Not reduced to stardust like the one left unopened and now disintegrated along with everything else in his quarters and the window that had so unnerved him and the shivering trees and the cold soil of the planet itself.</p><p>Hux took two bubbly glasses for breakfast, not bothering to dilute them with purple juice. The effervescence calmed his stomach and the alcohol calmed his mind. He ordered Hangar B clear effective immediately and then walked there in his off-duty clothes with the champagne bottle clasped by its neck in one pale hand. He sat on the catwalk above the TIE fighters, his sock feet hanging off the edge. That was how Ren found him.</p><p>“You should be resting,” Hux said morosely.</p><p>“You’re skinny,” Ren said, sitting beside him. He seemed miraculously alive compared to the way Hux had left him. He had bacta patches sealed to his side and collar bone. He’d yanked the scar tape from his face, and the wound promised to heal ugly without it, bisecting his features. But not unpleasant. Rugged. Ren had forgone a shirt, and his dusky nipples were pebbled up in the chill of the hangar, the muscles of his pecs and abs rippling down to the seam of his leggings. His huge boots swayed over open air next to Hux’s socks. “I knew it. The coat doesn’t hide it once you start looking. But you’re <em> really </em> skinny.”</p><p>“I am aware. I live in here,” Hux said, and Ren chuckled, running a bare hand along the sleeve of Hux’s gray shirt. Hux wondered suddenly what Ren’s skin would feel like on his. Not that he hadn’t wondered before, but in this moment he wondered specifically what it would feel like if Ren snaked a hand up under his shirt and gripped him with those big hands in the spots where softness lingered no matter how little he ate or how long he ran the track in the C Block gym.</p><p>“It was the sort of land only a Jedi could love,” Ren said. “But you loved it, didn’t you?”</p><p>“I think it’s the land that makes people crazy more than anything else. Look at Ilum. Every religious disciple has to go into a place like that for a crystal? And look at me. Raised among black cliffs and roaring surf and pounding rain. There’s more water than air on Arkanis. Sometimes the rains would come down so hard I couldn’t breathe walking between buildings.”</p><p>“By that logic I’d be sane,” said Ren.</p><p>“Oh?” Hux turned toward him, rather shocked despite himself. He’d always assumed Ren to be a spoiled Core World brat, but it was another matter to have that confirmed.</p><p>“There are no naturally-occurring dangers on Chandrila,” Ren sighed. “But here I am.”</p><p>“There’s a maelstrom in your soul. You don’t count,” Hux told him matter-of-factly.</p><p>“Is that how you get through life? An arsenal of dry witticisms.”</p><p>“As if you don’t deploy the same weaponry. Pot, kettle. Et cetera.” Hux drank from the bottle. Ren motioned for it and Hux handed it over, letting him take a hearty swig. The light changed beneath the surface of human vision, from gray to red to purple and then darkest pitch, arcing between the two of them off the indefinable quality some called a soul.</p><p>“We’ve known each other five years and counting,” Ren said once he swallowed, handing the bottle back over for Hux to drink. “It’s a lifetime for me. I killed the boy I was. Do you understand that?”</p><p>Hux nodded. He did, though he hadn’t been as theatrical in the affair as Ren had.</p><p>“I killed my father too,” Ren said. Quieter. Smaller.</p><p>Hux kept his face neutral. He’d received intel that the infamous Han Solo was lost in the assault on Starkiller, and had suspected as much. Ren seemed to be waiting for something, but Hux didn’t know how to give it. The moment passed.</p><p>“Well…” Ren continued, nodding to himself. “A lifetime. That’s what this has been, this….”</p><p>“Co-commandership,” Hux interjected, before Ren could choose a less appropriate label.</p><p>“This<em> co-commandership </em>. Goes to show, I guess. How little we understand the heart.”</p><p>“Are you confessing your feelings, Ren?”</p><p>“Neither of us needs to confess hatred. You know, if revolutionaries live long enough they become the establishment. Is that what you want, Hux?”</p><p>“It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” Hux answered honestly.</p><p>“Mom thought of herself as a revolutionary even when she was a senator,” Ren said, motioning for the bottle back. Hux gave it numbly, mind whirring. It was the first time he’d ever heard Ren call General Organa his mother. “That’s not how it works, though. That’s just not how it works,” Ren said, and swigged deep from the bottle, pulling a face and shivering afterward. It was dry champagne. “What would you be after the war?” Ren mused. “A senator? An Arkanan senator with silver rain rivulets stitched into your robes?”</p><p>Hux was tipsy enough to give up pretense. “Emperor. Chancellor, if whatever comes next involves the faintest pretense of democracy.”</p><p>Ren looked at him, dark eyes searching for something. Hux couldn’t tell whether he found it or not. “I hate this ship,” Ren said. “All of them are the same. I don’t know why you love it like you do. I hate it when the halls are full, because the thoughts are so <em> stupid </em>. But I hate it worse when they’re empty. It feels like I’ll turn the corner and something will be there. And that’s stupid too. I’m the baddest thing out there, right? A monster. But I still feel that way.”</p><p>“That’s not stupid,” said Hux, perhaps only to assuage himself. Ren passed the bottle back and Hux drained it, and then, feeling giddy, tossed it down to shatter on the durasteel floor far below.</p><p>Ren laughed, a real belly-laugh. “You’ve made a mess,” he said when he calmed.</p><p>“I suppose you need to tell me off, to balance it out.”</p><p>“When I woke up, it was because I thought someone knocked on the tank. Just once.”</p><p>“You ought to stop that,” Hux said. “You frightened me. I couldn’t sleep.”</p><p>“You ought to be frightened,” Ren said easily, with all the superiority of a professor informing Hux he shouldn’t smoke. “I have this dream over and over, that I’m looking for you in the rubble of a downed ship.”</p><p>“Oh? Did you check the john? I’m probably doing a line.”</p><p>“Hux, I’m serious. I have this dream and I’m looking for you, and the halls are dark-dark. Some of them are caved in and sparking. They tighten around me like a throat, and I can’t see clearly. There’s a haze, a sort of...disorientation, and I can’t feel my steps. Like my legs aren’t real. I can’t see myself when I look down. And then I find you. You’re in a closet just off the bridge, laying with your arms up like someone dragged you there by them. The light is flickering.”</p><p>“Stop,” said Hux, laying back, unable to sit anymore.</p><p>Ren laid back too beside him, and his voice held no guile. It was raw. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t. I find you in that closet, and you’ve been dragged there, and there’s a blaster wound smoking on your chest but you aren’t dead. They broke your dog tags off to add you to some record or another, but they didn’t clock that you aren’t fucking dead. Your skin’s all pale -- paler than normal -- and your hair is pulled down into your face. But you’re breathing shallowly. And that’s bad, and then I realize the reason it’s bad is because I’m not alive. I’m dead and you aren’t, so I can’t touch you.”</p><p>“I’m alive now.”</p><p>Ren’s arm unfolded like a switchblade and his hand buried itself in the back of Hux’s hair, Ren’s body twisting to fold over Hux’s. Ren kissed him brutally, the taste of spit giving only to the taste of blood after Hux split his lip. Ren repaid it, opening Hux’s lower lip between his teeth. Their tongues slid together, slick and alcohol-soured and perfect.</p><p>Hux’s eyes were open, looking into Ren’s open eyes. Someone had told him once that if you were in love with someone you closed your eyes when they kissed you. He saw the lights of the hangar shivering in Ren’s eyes, his own eyes shivering in Ren’s eyes. Ren’s hands clawed at him, warm even through the fabric of his shirt, feeling him, squeezing him like a fruit. Hux tried to get a hand onto the obvious erection straining the front of Ren’s leggings and Ren yanked it away, back up onto his chest. Hux squeezed him there instead, the firm give of pectoral muscle more enticing than his ex-wife’s breasts had ever been, the poor thing. He could send her a card. <em> I understand now </em>. She would doubt it, and perhaps she’d be right. He wouldn’t do that to her in actuality -- reestablishing contact would be needlessly cruel, and all of Hux’s cruelty served a need.</p><p>“You had a wife?” Ren gasped against his mouth.</p><p>“And a son,” Hux said. “Or some facsimile of it. The barest concept, dead within hours. Poison. My blood is poison.” He bit Ren’s lower lip again, pulling on it and then sucking, drinking blood just as deadly as his own as if it were honey. “Don’t you want to fuck me?” He asked the next time he came up for air.</p><p>“Shut up,” Ren told him, and kissed him again.</p><p>Hux’s brain melted under the influence of champagne and physical affection without motive. He’d never been kissed without being undressed before. Every lover he’d taken had only wanted to core him out and know every inch of his body before they knew the shallowest depths of his mind, and he’d killed them for the affront. Ren seemed content to kiss him forever, barely dipping his tongue in, wary of Hux’s snapping teeth.</p><p>“Kylo.”</p><p>
  <em> What? </em>
</p><p>“Call me Kylo. Ren is a title.”</p><p>“We aren’t together. What do you care what I call you?” Hux tried to drag Kylo’s hand to his shirt hem, and Ren pulled it away, the<em> tease </em>. His kisses were bruising, their lips swelling, the intrinsic taste of each of them melding together beneath the taste of blood and the finished and discarded champagne.</p><p>“You’re afraid,” Kylo rumbled. “You shrink from this. From nothing else, but from this.” He licked into Hux’s mouth and then pulled back, letting Hux chase him with a whine. “If I give you what you want you’ll rationalize it after.”</p><p>Hux’s mind whirred, looking for an angle to convince Ren to continue on now without giving up an ounce of freedom. Kylo’s hand fell heavy and warm on his throat and squeezed there, and Hux’s thoughts were obliterated by the feel of Kylo’s skin on his. He swallowed roughly. The room spun. He tried to tell himself it was only the alcohol.</p><p><em> More oh stars give me more, sex or death it doesn’t matter, only I can’t go on the same </em>.</p><p>“No,” said Ren. His mouth was red-stained. “You can kiss me. That’s all. You’re blinded to the significance of this. The power of it. That’s not your fault. He did it to you.”</p><p>Hux hissed out a breath, chest heaving at the thought of Brendol, at the reality that his father could have any sway over him from beyond the grave. Kylo’s hand was a calming weight on his neck, grounding him. Kylo kissed him again and it tasted like wet, mineralistic copper. When Kylo next pulled away his motion was like shutting a gate on a sepulcher.</p><p>“Please,” Hux rasped immediately, hating himself for begging.</p><p>“No,” Kylo said. “You’re not ready. I can’t have you in half-measures, and you aren’t ready.”</p><p>Hux wanted to rage against him. When had Kylo Ren ever shown restraint in his life? But before Hux could gather his thoughts, Kylo was gone. Hux stared up at the hangar ceiling and hated. He wasn’t sure what. Kylo, maybe. His father, perhaps. Himself, certainly. It wasn’t until he got dizzyingly to his feet, lurching up with hands like vices on the railing and licking his ruined lips, that he realized the hate had burnt his grief to ash.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>“Long live the <em> Supreme Leader </em>.”</p><p>Hux sagged to the floor, white knees surely bruised beneath his jodhpurs. He clapped a hand to his throat, wheezing, tears leaking from his eyes. He felt feverish. Every blink aching. The whites of his eyes must be bloody. Snoke’s protection had not outlived the old alien. Truth be told, Hux had thought that he and Kylo’s mutual fixation might still the Knight’s hand even without Snoke in the picture. He now knew that wasn’t true.</p><p>He coughed and spat, his saliva pink with blood on the durasteel floor. The knowledge that Kylo Ren had almost killed him cemented, becoming real. Smoke burned his nose. Ash settled in his red hair, making it feel oily. He longed for a shower. Blood rose metallic and undeniable in his throat with every swallow, with every breath of air. The taste of death narrowly avoided. Complete avoidance would have been his, if he’d pulled the trigger and cut down his old co-commander, but then what? With Kylo Ren dead on the floor beside the bisected body of Snoke, Hux would have <em> wondered </em>. Trite asphyxiation was nothing compared to unanswered questions. It was the questions that would come for you when the dust settled and you lay warm in your own bed. Hux swallowed frequently, defeat still lodged in his bruised throat.</p><p>Kylo swallowed too, but only once. Saliva dripped from his lips, his face still bright from the exertion of the evident fight that had occurred in the throne room. He spoke haltingly, sucking his spittle back into his mouth as if doing so made his hulking form more respectable. The ideal face he’d shown the scavenger -- before she allegedly murdered the Supreme Leader and his complete Praetorian Guard and defeated Kylo Ren to escape -- had slipped irreparably and the truth of Kylo showed through now.</p><p>“There’s a gridwork across your soul, Hux,” Kylo spat. “Like a scar. You can’t feel it, can you? How it’s shattered you. It dims your very life force. No, you <em> can’t </em> . How pathetic. My disappointment, General, <em> cannot be measured </em>.”</p><p>The lights flickered overhead. Hux reeled, waterfalls of sparks falling around them both. The <em> Supremacy </em> was coming apart under their feet, and somehow this was more compelling. Somehow...stars help him. Stars help him. He gasped, spat again.</p><p>“<em> You </em> can feel it,” Hux said. His mouth tasted rancid. Dead.</p><p>“Yes,” Kylo growled. “Why else would I have put up with you all these years? A man as dull and uninspired as you, blind to the Force?” He seemed to calm himself, standing up straight, raising his head from the battering ram of his shoulders, human again. “No. No, there’s something beneath the shifting green-gray sea you call a soul, something real. You endure. The galaxy exerts a Force on all of us, grinding trillions of bones to dust, a lake of blood there to observe for those who can see it…. Yours isn’t there. You’re hard as amber. The void buzzes with black radiation sweet as honey, and it’s sickened you. You ignore it.”</p><p>“Never did like anything sweet,” Hux said, meaning taste as well as anything else. He didn’t dare move, didn’t dare situate a foot beneath his weight to lift himself up. He let his knees wait in agony against durasteel. “It was you who always started our conversations of monsters.”</p><p>“Yes,” Kylo said, his voice distant.</p><p>“And it was you who kissed me, you who sucked living marrow--”</p><p>“<em> Enough! </em>” Kylo’s face twitched as if waking, his eyes focusing on Hux now, really seeing him. “Kriff, Hux.” He hauled Hux up by an arm and held him up, though Hux could stand. One gloved finger traced the angry marks already visible above Hux’s collar. The bruises would be purple by the morning, supposing he survived that long. Kylo brushed a speck of something off the shoulder of Hux’s greatcoat, lifted that hand up as if to cup Hux’s face, and then shuddered and put it back down. It was more of an apology than Hux had expected.</p><p>“The <em> girl </em> did a lot of damage here,” Hux said, eyeing a jagged saber mark on the floor that could only have come from Kylo’s disgrace of a weapon.</p><p>“She said I would turn.”</p><p>“To the rebels?” Hux raised an eyebrow. Now <em> that </em> was a novel idea. He hadn’t the faintest notion what the scavenger girl had planned on doing with Kylo Ren after she brought him to the Resistance. Half their bloody outfit would be calling for Kylo’s head the moment they saw him.</p><p>“No. To the Light.”</p><p>“Did you?” Hux asked mildly.</p><p>Kylo blinked, off-balance, and then seemed to recover. He looked incrementally less insane. “No.”</p><p>“The Dark’s got hold of you, then?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p><em> I almost killed him. I planned to </em>. “How would you do it? How would you summon those ghosts you told me to fear?”</p><p>“No, no, no--”</p><p>“You owe me, <em> Ren </em>.”</p><p>“Kylo. Call me Kylo. Please.”</p><p>“<em> Kylo </em> . You must tell me.” It didn’t taste like begging this time, even to Hux’s pride. It tasted like guiding, like ushering a hesitant student toward the necessary action. Kylo’s repeated dream hung heavy between them as Hux recovered his breath and Kylo recovered his identity, almost torn asunder by the scavenger, acting as messenger from a past self. As if divulging a great embarrassment, Kylo told Hux what to do. <em> A lonely place at night. That’s how it happens. You come across someone familiar in the darkness...in haunted loneliness one is two </em>.</p><p>Kylo showed him another vision, another half-baked dreaming prophecy. A bed in a simple one-room house with outmoded appliances, the both of them folded into the blankets together, Hux’s face buried into Kylo’s sweater. Their limbs tangled, holding themselves so firmly together as to be one thing. It was a cursed vision, because Hux had no intentions of living anywhere that rustic unless the war was lost. The image collapsed and reconfigured into the present. Hux coughed weakly. Droplets of grimy sweat were coming off them, rolling up instead of down and hanging suspended and glittering in the air, the Supremacy’s artificial gravity beginning to fail.</p><p>“I’ve been poisoned,” Hux said, which was not incorrect, but which made Kylo screw his face up again.</p><p>“You <em> doubt </em>. Even now you doubt,” Kylo spat.</p><p>“You like it,” Hux challenged him. “It’s half the fun.” He blinked and felt tears dislodge from his eyes. They floated up clear, but he had fully expected blood. A heavy, wine-dark trail of red orbs rising from his fever-pricked eyes, his throat on fire. “You didn’t happen to see anything else? We slink off into exile, or you die and I lay unconscious in a downed ship.”</p><p>“That’s all,” Kylo said. “As long as we continue on our current path. They feel equally as likely. You’ve done this to us.”</p><p>“I’ve done <em> nothing </em> but advance the Order—”</p><p>“You’ve broken me!” Kylo wailed. “Years thinking your...your obscene thoughts around me and flashing your wrists and...and the way you <em> look </em> at me! I tasted you and it wasn’t enough. It’s <em> worse </em>.” It was as if he was voicing Hux’s own thoughts. “It’s worse to know and go without you.”</p><p>“Then have me.”</p><p>“You’re no different than her,” Kylo seethed. “You’re <em> still holding on </em>. You’re treacherous.”</p><p>“If you want me declawed, you’ll wait forever.” Something crashed down somewhere, steel on steel, and Hux realized the absurdity of standing there chatting while the <em> Supremacy </em> burned. “We’ve got to move, <em> Supreme Leader </em>.”</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>It was a clear night. Hux walked up the stony mountain path alone, not another soul or even a droid within miles. He went out seldom and never without his hood drawn low. He’d grown a beard to obscure his face, but there was always the chance someone would take note of his coloring and pass the information along to the reformed Republic.</p><p>Paranoia, probably. Hux chuckled at his own anxiety, looking back the way he’d come at the white river churning under pink twilight. In all official documentation, General Hux was dead. Executed aboard the <em> Supremacy </em> shortly before the crash, and so many bodies on board were in too many tiny pieces for proper identification. A missing corpse would not necessarily drive the Republic into a search. Certainly he’d seen no signs of one yet. Hux wasn’t sure that Kylo foreseeing his survival could be called prophecy when it was undoubtedly self-fulfilling. He had only taken to wearing blast vests after Kylo first told him about that terrible dream. Of course it had been Pryde to try and take his life in the end. Who else? Hux had the satisfaction at least of knowing that dear Enric had likely been blown straight out the viewports on the bridge along with the rest of his crew. Hux had taken nothing from the wreck but one of the undamaged TIEs scheduled for launch at the time of the crash, and a data cylinder from Kylo’s quarters that no one would miss, containing assorted Sith texts. He dismantled the TIE once he landed here in the armpit of Wild Space, and took anything of value with him. Only someone very familiar with TIE fighters would know the discarded pieces for what they were. There was no trail to follow, should the Republic try.</p><p>Hux picked his way up his drive in the darkening evening, shedding his poncho and boots once he entered the house. It was the same simple affair Kylo had shown him, and so Hux had known it would be his when he first stumbled across it. It had needed a lot of fixing up, abandoned for years, but it was homey now. The air was getting cold, seasons changing. He’d done a lot of reading in exile, poring through Kylo’s assorted religious texts. There was always the possibility that he could do everything right and nothing would happen, and Hux was sure he would feel extraordinarily stupid either way, but tonight was the night. Cold and clear with a full moon. Three, in fact. Faced with one of their unhappy endings come true, why not try for the second?</p><p>Hux marked the circle on his floor in speeder repair tape and put out the items as the diagram in the data cylinder showed: candle, cup, knife, soil. He filled the cup from his canteen, the water taken from a nearby stream after the moon rose. He lit the candle. Pricked his finger on the knife until the tip of the blade shone red. Drew a sigil with his bloody finger in the soil. He waited. The wind howled outside, picking up as night deepened. The sky went purple and then black. The candle burned, wax dripping down its sides onto the floor. The conservator hummed dimly, an ugly old model with shiny silver edging. Shame made Hux’s face heat. What did he think, that he was going to summon Kylo like a demon in a scary story? It was nonsense. He would give up on this, cast all sorcery aside, and get on with the shadow that remained of his life. He sighed and looked at the wall that his bed rested against, thinking longingly of the vision Kylo had shown him, the one that had once seemed so horrid. Hux knew now there was something worse than losing together. Losing alone was a special sort of lonely hell.</p><p>Hux blinked, and the wall of his humble home was replaced with a solid granite rock face, black with shining chips of crystal like stars. He blinked again and a huge crack shattered through it, shards of rock crumbling down as the chasm widened. There was something writhing in the darkness. It approached, hands appearing first, one on each side of the crack in the rock face. A horror followed those hands. Hux realized he was looking into a face, or the absence of one. The very sight of it paralyzed him. The being was humanoid, with slick and cancerous flesh. Their face was a seething pit, like looking into the center of a blowtorch nozzle, except that the spouting jets of flame were pitch black and cold. Looking into that face was like sticking his head into a glacial stream. The being spoke, their voice like insect wings and squeaking frost on branches. Hux couldn’t understand a word, but he understood the sentiment: that this was the best the being could do, this form was the very least unsettling they could inhabit. To look upon their true face would bring instantaneous madness.</p><p>Hux cried out in sudden pain, gritting his teeth. He felt pried apart, opened up and cut apart and examined, tissues poked just to watch them bleed. Individual cells broken just to see how they leaked. The being’s hideous language grated at Hux’s ears and he understood it’s meaning -- he did not belong. He was not the sort of person who called on the Force. “I’m looking for someone who does,” Hux gasped.</p><p>The being reached out and touched his face, tilting his jaw to examine him. Their fingers felt like a serrated knife. His jawbone ached, burning cold beneath his skin. He almost feared his teeth would shatter. He was paralyzed and vivisected and completely aware for the hours that followed in dark and desolation. His home disappeared, and so did the rock face, and he and the being were alone in a void, sitting atop dim reflections of themselves as if the floor were a black obsidian mirror. They questioned Hux. Hux answered. It went on and on. Some of the questions seemed pertinent -- who did he seek and why? Some seemed ludicrous. Did he remember the taste of his mother’s milk? How did he most fear dying? Would he rather be someone else?</p><p>“No,” Hux said, and then his temper flared with impatience. He pushed back against the mental invasion, unaware before he did it that it was possible to try. The otherworldly grip on him receded and he shook his head, coughing. He clapped his hands to his face, checking. His skin was not in ribbons from that knifelike touch. “Who are you?” He demanded. “Can you give me what I want? Patch me through, or...I don’t know. Kriffing hells.”</p><p>The being laughed, a sound like clicking steel. <em> Lovely </em>, they said, more an image than a word. Lovely like sunlight on gleaming on the edge of a blade, lovely like fat drops of blood on a marble floor, lovely like a young corpse unravaged by time.</p><p>“What?”</p><p><em> Lovely. Void</em>. They showed him their exact meaning, the Hosnian system absent its five planets. A feeling of admiration came through with the picture, the sort of warm indulgence a parent feels for a small child stumbling along and trying to be helpful.</p><p>“You’re the Dark,” Hux murmured, and the being nodded. Hux wondered whether Kylo had spoken to this incarnation of the Force he worshipped. It seemed the sort of thing he’d like to do, given the chance. Hux could picture him firing off theological questions. Hux himself would rather never see this monster again once their business was concluded.</p><p><em> And so it is </em> , the Dark said, each word an unintelligible knife in Hux’s ears. <em> But there must be an exchange </em>.</p><p>Hux’s head snapped back, pulled back by an invisible grasp. The Dark reached out with a clawed hand and parted his throat like digging into soft clay. It closed around something, stealing it away, paralyzing it, and the hand jerked back out. The wound closed up. Agony flared and faded, healing faster than any wound could. Not even Kylo knitted himself back together so quickly.</p><p>He blinked, and he was back in his house. Hux shot up to standing, spooked. He tried to call out. <em> Wait! Wait, will you bring him? </em></p><p>No sound came out, not even a ragged whisper.</p><p>Hux’s larynx was dead in his throat, his most valuable weapon taken from him. Not that he was slated to give a rousing speech any time soon. Hux paced, rubbing his throat and clenching his other fist until his nails bit into his palms. He was breathing hard. He missed his uniform. He felt silly, thinking that now, but the weight of his coat would have grounded him better than the green knit sweater he wore. Cursing himself silently, Hux stooped to pick up the candle and blow it out. It was nearly dead anyway, the flame guttering in a molten shell. Hux shuddered to think what might have happened if it went out while he was still talking to the thing that lived in the cracks in space. The instant the flame died, there was a sharp knock on his door. Only one.</p><p>Hux dropped the candle, spilling wax all over the floor, and whirled to stare wide-eyed at the simple windowless door of his home. He approached it as a man might approach a ticking bomb and put his ear to the wood. He heard nothing beyond it but the rustling of the wind through the trees. He could picture the view, so familiar by now as to be a part of himself. It was amazing how quickly a planet could seep into your bones. This one was friendlier than Arkanis, but that was a low bar. Hux closed his eyes and pictured the mountainside and the winding river in the valley far below his house, rushing along under the electric tang of starlight and the moon white as an incisor. He pictured Kylo standing before it. Hux put his own hand on the door and knocked back once. He heard a low laugh, achingly familiar, and his heart jumped into his throat. He staggered back and threw open the door.</p><p>For only an instant Hux thought that no one was there after all, but then Kylo moved. He walked in, wearing a ragged sweater with a hole in it instead of his robes, his skin grimy. His scar was gone.</p><p>
  <em> What--? </em>
</p><p>“Rey healed it, before...you know.” Kylo said, and his voice, rough and low and <em> real </em>, made tears prick at Hux’s eyes.</p><p><em> The Republic eulogized you as Ben </em>.</p><p>“Glad I didn’t stick around to see that,” Kylo said distractedly, appraising Hux with wonder. “You grew a beard.”</p><p>Hux lifted one of his hands to his face, and then felt the scar across his throat just beneath his copper beard, five long scratches intersecting at odd angles. It felt old, healed into the flesh around it and not a hint of soreness beneath the surface. Just muted, damaged nerves. Kylo saw and stepped forward, tugging Hux’s hand away to look for himself. Hux’s heart stuttered when Kylo’s bare hand touched his, solid and warm.</p><p>“Hux…?”</p><p><em> It needed something from me. A trade </em>.</p><p>“Well, that’s an improvement.” Kylo flashed his crooked teeth in a grin and Hux thought daggers at him. Kylo kicked the door closed, shutting out the whispering of the trees. “I received notice from Pryde, after the fact. Stars, I wanted to kill him. Even though I knew you were alive. Did you really feed intel to the Resistance? <em> You? </em> The First Order is your whole life. Well, was.”</p><p><em> Yes, </em> Hux thought venomously. <em> And you handed it to Enric </em>.</p><p>“Did you come looking for me to get revenge?” Kylo’s eyes were sparkling with amusement. Hux launched himself at him, wrapping his legs around Kylo’s waist and kissing him hard. Kylo walked them forward and pinned Hux against the wall, one muscular thigh between Hux’s legs. Their kisses were just as fervent as the last time, just as violent. Kylo’s teeth dragged along his lip and Hux opened his mouth to Kylo’s tongue. He felt his throat move, muscles contracting in the right motions to produce a moan, but no sound came out. He grabbed Kylo back, hands clawing at his sweater, gripping him hard, afraid the spell would wear off. Hux licked into Kylo’s mouth, returning the favor, and Kylo moaned loud enough for the two of them.</p><p>
  <em> Hells. </em>
</p><p>Kylo tilted his head, moving down to Hux’s throat, nose tickling his beard as he sucked ungentle kisses on Hux’s neck too, leaving scattered bruises. His kisses were gentler on the scar tissue, almost careful. One of his big hands buried itself in Hux’s hair, tugging at him to change the angle, baring more of his throat for Kylo to ravage. Kylo pulled off, his eyes dark with desire, his face flushed, and the front of his leggings tented out over a sizable erection. Hux could sympathize. He rolled his hips against Kylo’s thigh for some much-needed friction, and Kylo groaned with want. He spun Hux around then, slamming him into the wall with more force than necessary. Hux gasped, shoulder and the side of his head smarting pleasantly. Kylo pressed up against him, kissing his neck again from a new angle, cock throbbing against the curve of his ass through their clothing.</p><p><em> You’ve determined we can finally do this </em>.</p><p>“Want to fuck you before I die again,” Kylo said, sounding put-out about it.</p><p>If Hux could laugh in glee he would. <em> Was that your final thought? ‘I should have fucked Hux.’ </em></p><p>“One of them.” Kylo rucked Hux’s sweater up and Hux pulled it back down, shaking his head. <em> I have a perfectly good bed, as you can see. It’s cold out. </em>Kylo’s hands moved to his belt, unclasping it and pulling his trousers and pants down as one. Hux stepped out of them, wanting anything Kylo would give him more than he wanted to move into bed. The air was chilly on Hux’s bare legs, Kylo still clothed behind him. Hux braced his hands on the wall and evened out his stance, hips thrust slightly back. Kylo’s hands roamed, cupping the softness of his stomach through his sweater, sliding around to his ass, palms dragging up his thighs.</p><p>Kylo knelt, hands on Hux’s hips. His breath was hot and humid on the cleft of Hux’s ass. Kylo spread him, and then his tongue slid slow over Hux’s hole, making him shudder. He swirled his tongue around Hux’s rim on the next lick, and on the next pass pressed inside. Licking him loose, fucking him with his tongue. Hux’s legs trembled. His cock throbbed, dripping clear precome from the tip.</p><p>
  <em> Stars, don’t stop. </em>
</p><p>As if waiting for an order to disobey, Kylo pulled back and bit his right buttock hard, sure to leave purple teeth-marks in his wake, and then stood up. “Do you have oil?”</p><p><em> On your right </em>.</p><p>Kylo shifted. Hux felt the cloth of his leggings brush against him as Kylo twisted to extend his hand. The bottle on Hux’s bedside table zipped over to his palm and Hux heard Kylo pop the cap open and slick himself up. He’d pulled his leggings down enough to get his cock out, and the wet head of it poked Hux’s tailbone when Kylo released it from his own oily grip. Then the first slick finger breached him, and Hux’s thoughts derailed.</p><p>Hux breathed out sharply through his nose at the burn of it, already leaning back, trying for more. Kylo pushed that finger in to the knuckle and wiggled it around, fucking it in and out until Hux was battering him with mental feedback for more, and then withdrew and pushed a second in. He scissored them, stretching Hux, and Hux’s mouth opened but no cry came out. His hands trembled on the wall. Kylo crooked his fingers, pressing hard on Hux’s prostate, and a jolt of white-hot arousal went through him, racing up his spine. Kylo leaned in to lick at his earlobe, and Hux tried not to think about where that tongue had just been. Kylo chuckled, seeing his revulsion anyway, and licked his cheek too. He pushed a third finger in. His hands were huge, fingers thick. Three would be enough.</p><p>
  <em> I’m ready. Come on. </em>
</p><p>The world spun as those fingers were yanked out and Kylo twirled Hux around again to face him. Hux knew he must be even more disheveled than exile had already demanded of him, sweating and pink with his hair mussed and prick leaking. Kylo looked at him as if he’d never seen anything more beautiful. Kylo hauled him up unceremoniously, a hand under each thigh and Hux’s back pressed against the wall -- Hux was thankful he’d elected to keep his sweater on, the wall was cold and hard even through the fabric -- and then Kylo lined himself up and lowered Hux onto his cock. The incredible stretch of Kylo entering him overwhelmed his senses. Again, Hux felt cheated by the inability to moan. He wanted to find some leverage, something to brace his feet against and widen his stance, but he was pinned. He bit his lip and then thought he might bite through it, and relaxed his mouth with effort, his hands resting on Kylo’s chest. When Kylo was spearing him completely, dark pubic hair ticking Hux’s flesh, Hux remembered to breathe. He got one gulp of air in before Kylo lifted him up and then dragged him back down, hips jerking up, thrusting into him at the same time that he manually fucked him onto his cock. He paused to adjust the angle, hands bruisingly tight on the backs of Hux’s thighs.</p><p>“So good,” Kylo groaned, voice low, and on the next push in he hit Hux’s prostate. Hux shuddered in his grasp, hands clawing for purchase, and so Kylo replicated the movement again and again until Hux’s chest was heaving, his breaths fevered. “Like you were made to take me.”</p><p><em> I’m older. You were made to fuck me </em> , Hux corrected him, earning a sharper thrust for it. Kylo grunted at the same instant molten pleasure coiled in Hux’s belly, speeding up, breathing hard. He mouthed at Hux’s cheek, obviously wanting a kiss that Hux didn’t want to give him until he’d brushed his teeth. <em> I’m going to-- </em></p><p>“Me too...<em> fuck </em> ...gonna fill you up…. You’re so tight. Don’t come. Don’t come yet. <em> Hux </em>.”</p><p>Hux blinked and then nodded dreamily, though he wasn’t sure it was a promise he could keep. He’d almost thought that Kylo was talking to himself. His own cock was beginning to ache, bobbing with Kylo’s savage thrusts into him. Kylo’s rhythm stuttered and he thrusted in once more, deep, and came with a growl. Hux looked at him with rapt attention, fighting against the urge to tip his head back and let his eyes flutter closed and join Kylo in toppling over the edge. He thought he could come just from the sensation of Kylo spilling into him if he let himself, feeling the hot pulse of Kylo’s release -- kriffing hells there was a lot of it. Kylo throbbed against his rim with every pulse, and on the third one Hux felt hot fluid drip down his thigh. Kylo’s plush lips were open and soft, his eyes scrunched closed and his brows low, and the sight of that was more important than Hux’s own envious prick, jumping with every rocking movement Kylo made now. Hux memorized the scene Kylo made of himself, stowing it away like a treasure.</p><p>Kylo pulled out, another sloppy rush of obscene wetness rushing out of Hux with him, and then Hux's feet hit the floor and he couldn’t support himself on them, collapsing forward against Kylo. “I’ve got you,” Kylo muttered. “I’ve got you.” He tucked his softening cock back into his leggings with one hand and then bent and scooped Hux up, walking him the few steps to his bed and laying him down. “Let me see.” Hux opened one knee out and let Kylo push it up to put his ruined hole on display, loose and reddened and white-slicked. Then the heat of Kylo’s mouth enveloped Hux’s cock and he sucked and Hux arched up off the bed, coming hard.</p><p>Kylo coughed and pulled off, semen dribbling down his chin and the last pulse of Hux’s orgasm hitting him right on that big nose. Hux smirked at him, though he was afraid the overall effect was ruined by the utter lovesickness he couldn’t stifle in his brain. Kylo was so gorgeous. Hux dragged him up by his hair and licked him clean, even Kylo’s lips. Kylo took the opportunity for what it was and kissed him senseless. Eventually they slowed and then stopped, Kylo kicking off his boots before crawling fully into bed with Hux. They tangled themselves together, biting lazily at each other’s kiss-swollen lips. Kylo snaked an arm under Hux’s side, hand roaming low, and then pushed a finger back inside him. Hux shivered, overstimulated, gasping against Kylo’s mouth.</p><p>“Wet.”</p><p>
  <em> Disgusting. </em>
</p><p>“I always come a lot. Should have warned you.” He added a second finger and sluggish heat coursed through Hux, though his penis stayed limp. Spent. Kylo used that grip on him -- <em> in </em> him -- to pull Hux against his chest. Hux reached behind himself to tug Kylo’s digits out of him with a scowl, but then he tossed a leg over Kylo’s hip, snuggling in. They both smelled incredibly of sweat, but at this moment Hux didn’t mind. He’d rather smell Kylo than his own empty sheets.</p><p><em> Will you be here when I wake up? </em> Hux asked.</p><p><em> There’s no getting rid of me now. I’ll serve your life sentence with you</em>, Kylo responded, putting his voice directly into Hux’s mind so that he wouldn’t need to pause in kissing his sweaty forehead.</p><p>The universe dilated within them. Something bubbly like joy or terror crescendoed in Hux’s heart even as his consciousness dimmed in exhaustion. When he slept he dreamed that he lay bound together with Kylo by a silver chain in the center of a circle, caged by cup and candle and knife and earth. The sweat beaded up on their skin detached and rose in rippling bubbles just as his tears had on the <em> Supremacy </em>. His cheeks were wet, but the droplets that floated up from his eyes now were the ruby ones he had expected before. Blood glittered on his bare chest and arms and thighs, drawn up out of his pores. The same phenomenon was happening to Kylo. Kylo squeezed him reassuringly, and Hux nuzzled his face back into Kylo’s chest. Red rhinestones lifted from them and rose up toward the stars, up into the crack in the galaxy, into the great and hungry darkness there.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>*picks a prompt to write for*</p><p>*writes fuckin everything else on top of it*</p><p>Major 'that's not how the Force works' tag here. We'll just say the Dark side is less demanding (up front) when restoring a life than the Light side is (it takes its blood in the interest payments, like my student loan provider). I had more ideas for this and then realized, "Eep, I'm also doing Horror Movie AU and it's not done!" so we skipped the events of TROS completely. See y'all again on the 16th!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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